Fletch
I'll Lock Up
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- Iowa - The Land That Stuff Forgot
As a cosseted layabout with a sense of entitlement that probably would have had your ma bringing in the morning ice water in a full trash can, I've studied this particular phase of our culture quite intently over many years. I've had to, frankly, just to get by in a world where it's often very hard to tell what kind of "work ethic" people profess to, let alone how seriously they take it.My objection to the term "conservative" is basically that most people today have no idea who Edmund Burke was -- and that therefore the word carries a certain political odor that I don't think helps the very valid arugments being made.
There's an assumption today -- promulgated especially since the 1960s, and exhaustively since the 1980s -- that you have to be politically-conservative to carry traditional views about the work ethic, the importance of self-discipline, and the value of personal modesty. I'm living proof that this is not the case -- and I think it's important that the distinction is made, because I think that image will only put off young people who have no use for the political aspects but might very well understand the importance of the general values under discussion. Indeed, I think the politicization of values has been perhaps *the* most destructive phenomenon to wrack American culture in the last fifty years, and unless we get away from it, we'll never see any real improvement.
I'm a product of, basically, pre-boomer working class culture, and very proud of it. Traditional views on work and self-discipline were necessary for survival in that culture -- and I think they're just as necessary today. In modern culture's haste to abandon anything that smacks of "working class", we've thrown out the bathwater without even bothering to think of the baby.
My take on it is that few of us have ever had a true-blue work ethic. It's mostly a matter of imposed circumstances - having to feed yourself in a for-profit market system, for one, and usually having to go far afield of the mostly mythic "honest day's work for an honest day's pay" to do so. All this depended on a healthy respect for authority - authority that wasn't always healthy and didn't owe anyone much respect. That eventually pervaded everyday life - good in some ways (low crime, vandalism, good manners), bad in others (high racism, sexism, anti-individuality).
When the authoritarian character of daily life began to retreat to its last stronghold, the for-profit workplace, that left us with nothing on which to base any ethic of self-discipline. We'd only ever had an ethic of self-submission to outer discipline. Community values that emphasize the group, taking care, and the common good seem to go hand in hand with a rigid authority figure - if they're not imposed with a threat in back of them, many of us just don't see the point in having them at all. The values are thought to have no value - to be airy-fairy, namby-pamby, wishy-washy. Instead of a work ethic or a full and strong community ethic, we have an obedience ethic - and a flawed and sometimes contradictory one.
As Lizzie alludes (without saying so in so many words), those values have been unfairly coopted. And I don't mean just politically - no, it goes deeper. No one at any point on the political spectrum can imagine them being real without a particularly nasty kind of authority - the kind that keeps men together on the battlefield because it's taught them that thinking critically under fire costs lives, only it's found its way into many areas of life where it ought not belong.
I have experienced positive and responsible authority, and I have experienced high-handed and self-righteous authority. I believe there is much more of the latter kind. (I may be biased; my type of personality seems to bring out the inner authoritarian in many people.) It's easier, it gets a lot more psychic and emotional rocks off, and it's by and large what we are used to. To paraphrase Lizzie, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. But let's not allow him to terrorize the pets, then call it an admirable show of initiative.
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